SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc. is tightening its privacy leash on employees in an effort to ensure they don't intrude on people while the Internet search leader collects and stores information about its users.

Besides promoting longtime employee Alma Whitten to be its director of privacy, Google said it will require all 23,000 of its employees to undergo privacy training. The company also is introducing more checks aimed at making sure workers are obeying the rules.

Google's tougher privacy measures appear to be a response to recent breaches that have raised questions about the company's internal controls and policies.

In the most glaring example that indicated the company didn't have a good grasp on what its workers were doing, Google acknowledged in May that one of its engineers had created a program that vacuumed up potentially sensitive personal information, including e-mails and passwords, from unsecured wireless networks while Google cars cruised neighbourhoods around the world. The vehicles were dispatched primarily to take photos for Google's online mapping service, but they also carried equipment to log the location of Wi-Fi networks.

The incident, which some critics have derisively labelled as "Wi-Spy," was caused by "an engineer's careless error as well as a lack of controls to ensure that necessary procedures to protect privacy were followed," Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart concluded in a report this week.